The abbreviation “ALS” did not mean much to most people when the term was used before the summer of 2014. I, along with thousands of others, had no idea that the neurodegenerative disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as ALS, even existed until the Ice Bucket Challenge event exploded on social media. The Ice Bucket Challenge is a charitable social media challenge where somebody posts a video of themselves dumping ice-cold water on their head to show support for a specific cause or charity. After the completion of the challenge, the participant then challenges others to dump the cold water on themselves and post a video within 24 hours of being challenged or they must donate to a cause selected by the challenger. This version of the Ice Bucket Challenge, where the challenger could choose any cause, had been popular in the athletic community prior to Summer 2014. Now, the Ice Bucket Challenge is primarily associated with ALS and the ALS Association due to the social media campaign that took place in Summer 2014. The ALS Association got involved with this awareness campaign after golfer, Chris Kennedy, posted a video dumping a bucket of icy water onto himself and then nominated his cousin’s wife using ALS as his cause of choice. Kennedy’s cousin participated and then nominated her friends who also participated and nominated their friends and the challenge continued to spread and exploded with the ALS cause attached to it from there.
Thanks @JonBullas. You're up next @KevinAylwin, Jeanette Senerchia and @mattdodson7 #IceBucketChallenge http://t.co/3jKEwvaxA2
— Chris Kennedy (@ckgolfsrq) July 15, 2014
The ALS Association along with other ALS organizations noticed their donations had increased substantially within the weeks after Kennedy had posted his video and soon discovered it was because of this Ice Bucket Challenge. The ALS Association then got behind the challenge and updated their website and social media pages to promote this viral challenge. Their objective in this was to continue the viral growth of this campaign thus increasing ALS awareness and donations towards the cause.
It is extremely difficult to get something, especially a marketing campaign, to go viral and nobody really knows exactly how to do it. The ALS Association almost got lucky that the challenge went viral before they got involved because it made their work a lot easier. Their strategy while the viral challenge was in its prime (Summer 2014) was to keep it going and to promote it further under their name. The ALS Association updated their webpage and social media profiles, posting Ice Bucket Challenge tutorials and easy-to-understand ALS information. They also posted ALS Ice Bucket Challenge logos, fliers, and promoted hastags like #IceBucketChallenge, #StrikeOutALS, and #ALS, which were primarily used on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, according to Splash Score.
This campaign exemplified the power viral content has in increasing awareness of and participation in causes or with brands. As of December 2014, the ALS Association had raised $220 million in donations, according to ALS Association CEO, Barbara Newhouse, in a Washington Business Journal article. The vast majority of these donations were the result of the viral marketing campaign that had taken place in the previous months. The power viral content has is remarkable. In this case, 17 million Ice Bucket Challenge videos were created and posted in 159 countries around the world, which reached approximately 440 million people and helped generate this substantial sum of money for the cause (Ad Week) . Events that take place on social media have the power to go viral quicker than on any other media platform due to the extreme connectedness of users’ networks. On any social media site when one of your connections was tagged in an Ice Bucket video, or posted one, or reposted (retweeted) one, it would pop up in your feed and everyone else in their network’s feeds whether they were connected with the person who created the original post or not. On Twitter, 4.4 million tweets used the hashtag #IceBucketChallenge, and about two-thirds of these tweets were retweets (Splash Score). Below shows the breakdown of twitter involvement during the peak months (August) of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.
(Photo from: Splash Score)
This massive amount of posting and reposting that occurred helped the challenge explode as people were seeing hundreds of Ice Bucket videos from people inside and outside of their networks, and this eventually included celebrities too. These high levels of involvement caused others to want to jump onto the Ice Bucket bandwagon and join the challenge to help support this cause. In my opinion, the overwhelming success of this social media event could not have been achieved by using any other form of media because none are as connected and “personal” as social media are.
Unfortunately when a campaign like this goes viral once, it is very hard to make it happen again. The ALS Association tried to have the Ice Bucket Challenge reoccur every August until a cure is found, however, while donations were still up from previous years, not nearly as many Ice Bucket Challenge videos were posted this past August as in August 2014. According an International Business Times article, The Association tried to promote the reoccurring event using targeted Facebook advertisements towards people who participated last year, and having people suffering from ALS speak out online, but their attempts did not seem to be successful. I think the viral nature of content is more of a one-time phenomenon—once everybody has seen it or participated in it, people move on to the next viral phenomenon and it becomes old news. Another take away from the Ice Bucket Challenge is that parody spin-off challenges have come about thus taking away from the seriousness of the original challenge. For example, a challenge where teens snort illegal drugs then challenge a friend to do the same and post videos of themselves to social media has come about in recent months. These types of parody challenges contribute to the challenge the ALS Association faces in trying to make the Ice Bucket Challenge reoccur every August.
The media landscape has changed dramatically due to the still growing popularity of social media sites. Companies and organizations can leverage these large networks of connected people by making their marketing campaigns something that all of one’s friends are doing, but also make it slightly exclusive (feeling that one must be nominated in order to participate). If companies and organizations can properly execute this type of marketing campaign, they can be as successful as the ALS Association was with the Ice Bucket Challenge.